


Foxfire

by Aloysia_Virgata



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Season/Series 11
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-12
Updated: 2018-02-12
Packaged: 2019-03-17 01:59:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13649085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aloysia_Virgata/pseuds/Aloysia_Virgata
Summary: For Perplexistan, who thought our heroes should be afforded an opportunity to acknowledge their own remarkable aging.





	Foxfire

He wakes her just past eleven thirty, his fingers in her hair and her name in her ear. Her lips are parted in her sleep, but he does not kiss them. Her freckles look like gold dust.

 

“What’s wrong? What’s the matter?” Scully sits up, eyes wide and concerned. Her legs are nearly bare in summer pajamas. She prefers to keep the air conditioner off.

 

He smoothes her hair, shifting his weight on the creaky floorboards. “Nothing. Nothing’s wrong. Just get up. It’s a surprise.”

 

Her eyes narrow now, suspicious. She bunches the light blanket over herself. “Mulder. You smell of fire.”

 

“Do I? That’s so weird. Get up, Scully.” He holds his hand out to her, wiggles his fingers. They make shadows on the wall.

 

Scully rubs her face, yawning. “What time is it?”

 

“Late-ish.” Mulder takes her hands in his then, tugs her up. She scarcely grazes his chin in her bare feet. He notices that her toenails are painted.

 

Scully grumbles her displeasure. “Mulder, if this about those raccoons behind the shed again, I’m going to be really irritated.”

 

Mulder tightens the drawstring of his yellow pajamas pants, scratches his stomach. A breeze comes in through the window screen, stirring their hair. “It’s not raccoons.”

 

“Do I need to get dressed?”

 

“Thankfully not.” He tugs at the little ribbon on her camisole.

 

Scully nudges her feet into a pair of slippers. Her footsteps slap softly after his as they head downstairs and out the back door. The screen door bangs shut behind her.

 

Outside, the world is still. The moon, nearly full, casts a clear silver light over everything. The air is warm and sultry, sweet with white flowers. Cicadas chirps from the trees, bullfrogs and spring peepers down by the water.

 

Scully wraps her arms around him from behind, peering around his shoulder. “What is it, Mulder?”

 

He takes a moment to enjoy the press of her skin against his, her hands clasped at his waist. Her silk pajamas are cool against his bare back.

 

“Mulder?”

 

“Come on,” he says, and pulls her around beside him.

 

They walk through the lush grass of the back acreage, crushing pennyroyal and bee balm in their wake. Scully sniffs appreciatively, then frowns. “I smell fire again,” she says.

 

Mulder shrugs. They pass the shed, weathered and gray with a rooster vane on the peaked red roof. A rainbarrel squats low and shadowed beside it.

 

“Raccoons,” Scully says, pointing at two pairs of glowing eyes under the wheelbarrow. “Your trash-destroying pals.”

 

“Don’t hate the player; hate the game.”

 

She smiles, shaking her head.

 

Down the dirt path behind the fir trees, onto a carpet of fallen needles. They are soft beneath his bare feet. Scully snaps a twig, and the frogs go silent. The red glow of the fire can be seen now, just around the bend, and Scully glances up at him, questioning.

 

“Midsummer night,” he tells her. “Enchantment surrounds us, Scully. Will o’ the wisps and fairies are about. Puckish elementals.”

 

“Hmmm,” she replies, stepping over a log.

 

They follow the curve to the pond, a low-lying depression fed by a spring in the hillside. Scully gasps when she sees the fire; it must be six feet tall.

 

“Midsummer night,” he repeats. “Bonfires are customary.”

 

She’s aglow beside it, her fair skin tawny, her hair scarcely distinguishable from the flame. She watches sparks kick out, spiraling in the updraft. They tumble down again as ashes, as pale gray snow. Her face is beatific.

 

He’d spent the better part of two hours moving rocks and hauling wood, earning at least four Indian Guide badges in the process. The fire is enclosed in a circle of large stones, well away from any tinder. Its twin ripples on the surface of the pond.

 

“Mulder,” Scully breathes at last. Her eyes are very bright.

 

“They used to think the bonfires at midsummer would keep dragons from poisoning wells and springs,” he says. “And as we have both…”

 

“It’s beautiful,” she says. “This is really..it’s incredible.”

 

He crosses his arms, beaming. “I have marshmallows.”

 

Her laugh is a bell in the night. “Of course, of course you do. Where?”

 

“In the ferns. But how about a swim first, Scully?” He rocks back on his heels in the damp earth.

 

She looks at him for a long beat. “Okay,” she agrees.

 

Mulder unfastens his pants, lets them fall around his feet. The fire feels good on his skin. He is acutely aware of his own nudity beneath her steady gaze, clear and unwavering as the moon.

 

“You checking me out, doc?” he asks.

 

“You look good,” Scully says, her head cocked. “You’ve always looked good, Mulder, but pushing sixty makes it particularly impressive.”

 

He glances down at himself, sees his ridged abdominal muscles, his well-developed quads. Exercise has always been his retreat, and the results are admittedly pleasing. “I wouldn’t kick me out of bed, I guess.”

 

She laughs again. “I certainly don’t plan to.”

 

“Your turn. Strip down, m’lady.”

 

She whisks the camisole over her head, tugs her shorts to the ground. They fall in twin blue puddles atop her discarded slippers. Her foxy hair is tumbled over her shoulders like a mantle.

 

Mulder stares back at her. She is slim and lean and fierce, primal in this nexus of the four elements. She is gold and rose and crimson. The only soft parts of her body are her breasts, still firm and high. She tosses her hair. _Boudicea_ , he thinks. _Artemis._

 

“Well?” Scully asks, her chin tipped up.

 

“You look like Simonetta Vespucci,” he tells her, admiring the dip of her belly by firelight, the tuft of darker hair between her thighs.

 

“Oh?” she says. “Am I your muse, Mulder?”

 

He blinks, surprised. “Is that really a question?”

 

Scully steps closer, an arm's length between them. She is backlit by the licking flames, tight-bodied and elegant. He thinks that, a thousand years ago, men would have fallen in fealty to her.

 

“Not for a long time,” she answers.

 

“Good,” he says. “Scully, I assure you once more that I do not think of you as old. Your denials of witchcraft aside, you have clearly found some decoction or cantrip to stymie aging. Centuries past, they’d have burned you in that fire for having the body of twenty-five year old at fifty-three.”

 

“Magic nothing,” she retorts. “Some of us aren’t blessed with your metabolism, Mulder, and we have to work hard to maintain our figures. Besides, I didn’t look this good at twenty-five.” Scully smooths her hands over her hips, preens a little.

 

“We’re gonna be the talk of the old age home in a few years,” Mulder says. “Roll up in there, looking so fine. All the other guys are gonna offer you their gelatin desserts and prune juice.”

 

“If we’d both stop being so vain about our hair, we’d be a couple of silver foxes, Mulder.” She leans forward, a conspiratorial gleam in her eye. “Silver _fox,_ get it?”

 

He grins. “I get it, it’s good. You’re hilarious.”

 

“I am,” she says. “No one really knows that.”

 

He takes a step forward and, in one fluid motion, hooks one arm beneath her knees and the other behind her head. She yelps in surprise, but offers no further protest. He carries her to the edge of the pond, then steps in. It feels delicious after the heat of the bonfire, and he wades in until the water laps at his thighs. He looks down at Scully, who is chewing her lip.

 

“Land woman,” he intones deeply. “I have decided to take you to my kingdom under the waves.”

 

“There aren’t any waves here, really,” she says. “It’s too small.”

 

He tosses her into the water.

 

She comes up sputtering, hair sleek as a seal. “MULDER!”

 

“You have disrespected my people,” he tells her in the same deep voice.

 

She smacks a spray of water at him, then turns to swim deeper into the water, into the night.

 

Delighted, he follows, catching her easily. He’s always been the far stronger swimmer. Her body is slippery in his arms, her skin milky as the moon again. Her breasts are crushed against his chest, her biceps gripped in his hands.

 

She pants, pupils dilated to capture the starlight. Their legs bump as they tread water.

 

“Gotcha,” he whispers into the space below her ear. He’s sure it has a name, an elaborate compound Latin one that Scully knows. He cannot break her down into parts so readily.

 

“Let me go,” she murmurs, her voice so throaty that it makes his groin ache and stir.

 

He does, and she puts her arms around his neck, her legs around his waist. Scully shifts her weight slowly, admitting him by centimeters into the slick heat of her body. She gasps a little, settles her weight against his hips.

 

Mulder groans and steers them back to where he can at least get some footing.

 

Scully dips her head back, her hair brushing the surface of the pond. Droplets of water follow the long tendons of her neck, settle in the pockets above her collarbones. Her breasts are at the water line. “Look up,” she tells him.

 

He does and above them is the Milky Way, the opalescent arc of a nighttime rainbow. They have both been among these stars. Mulder braces her with his hands until she is bent backwards at the waist, sprawled across the water like a naiad.

 

“The shortest night of the year,” she says, gazing skyward still. “I’m so glad you woke me up for it, Mulder.”

 

“Oh, me too,” he breathes, kneading her shoulders.

 

“In all our years, Mulder, I can’t believe you never found a mermaid,” she says, fanning her pale fingers out. “A mermaid is so completely up your alley.”

 

“They’ll drag a man out to sea and drown him,” Mulder says. “Far too risky.”

 

Scully arches her back then, bringing her head and torso back up and against him. He grinds his teeth against the sensation it produces in his cock.

 

She wraps her arms around his neck again, rests her head against him. “I would have never let that happen,” she says.

 

He moves them slowly through dark water, hands sleeking over her body, as the fire continues to burn.

  
  
  
  
  



End file.
